For example, the client asked me, “Can we edit the static content?” Now if I had asked about this as a requirement at the beginning of the project, we might have gone with Drupal instead–although the Rails Surveyor still feels cleaner than a CCK-based survey type, so we might’ve stayed with Rails.

Anyway, we were well into Rails now, so I looked for a content management system that I could integrate into the Rails 3-based website. After some experimenting with Refinery CMS (looks slick, but couldn’t get it to do what I wanted) and Comfortable Mexican Sofa (looked pretty geeky), I settled on Rich CMS. I nearly gave up on Rich CMS, actually, because I’d gotten stuck, but the web demo helped me figure out what I needed to do in order to enable it.

We’re still emptying and reloading the database a lot, though, so I wanted to make sure that I could save the CmsContent items and reload them. I didn’t want to back up the entire database, just a table or two. There were some gems that promised the ability to back up specific models, but I couldn’t figure it out. Eventually I decided to use the table-focused Rake code I saw in order to export the data to fixtures (seems to be based on code from the Rails Recipes book).

Then I can call rake myproj:save_content and rake myproj:load_content to do the right thing. Or rather, my co-developer (a new IBMer – hello, Vijay!) can do so, and then check his work into our git repository. =)

Now we can re-create the development database as often as we’d like without losing our page content!